Selling a 9-Month Old Amazon Affiliate Site For $17,000!

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I always love success stories – especially when they come from my readers.

Today, I have the pleasure to share with you the story of how Hieu Nguyen has built and sold one of his very first websites for over $17k in just a short period of 9 months.

His success really proves that affiliate marketing really works and anyone can do the same with hard work and dedication.

Ok, Take it away Hieu…


What is your name, where are you from and what is your current job/profession?

Hi everyone, I’m Hieu Nguyen from Vietnam. After 2 years of working as a software engineer in a boring outsourcing company, I decided to quit 2 months ago. I’m now doing Affiliate Marketing full time, mostly building Amazon niche sites.

How did you get started on building amazon affiliate websites? How long have you been building websites?

After 1 year of working in my day job, I realized that I didn’t like it, and didn’t want to live that boring life. I thought I had to find other thing to do… more freedom, more fun and of course, more money.

Last June, I found a local Affiliate Marketing course that discussed many ways of making money online. After a few videos, I stopped watching the rest, and just focused on building niche sites with Amazon.

I built 2 niche sites with my own content, but they were too competitive, and I was too impatient. I gave up after a few weeks.

Luckily, at that time, I found http://www.nichepursuits.com/ and https://www.cloudliving.com/. Both sites contained a lot of informative and valuable posts.

From there, I learned how to find an easy- to-rank keyword, outsource content, and build backlinks that work. I decided to build another site following their advice.This was last August and now, it has become the website that I successfully sold at $17K. .

Tell us about one (preferred) or more about your successful websites. What is the URL and what niche are you targeting? If you are not willing to publicly share your domain or niche, that’s just fine.

I should keep the URL confidential to protect the buyer. It’s in a seasonal sport niche which has much more traffic and buyer intent during the summer.

How much money do you make from this successful website(s) each month? Feel free to share your traffic stats as well.

Here is my income breakdown from September 2021 to May 2021:

September: $0

October: $16.00 (It didn’t rank on Google yet, sales from Bing/Yahoo)

November: $20.00 (It didn’t rank on Google yet, sales from Bing/Yahoo)

December: $127.02

January 2020: $110.92 (The main keyword ranked 1st in the middle of the month)

February: $325.54

March: $551.65

April: $1,298.06

May: $1,632.47 (EF migrated my site to the buyer hosting on May 22)

So I got $4,081.66 in 9 months from September to May 2019. That’s about $453/month. I sold it for about $17k.

The total cost is about $3500 (content, link building, broker fee), so I got about $17,500 in profit.

What is the main reason for this website’s success?

I think it’s keyword research and effective link building strategy.

How Did You Find The Niche? What’s Your Criteria To Determine Winning Keywords?

I dug all the categories on Amazon, took note, then used GKP to find main keywords having >1500 US monthly local search.

After having a few buyer keywords, I used Long Tail Pro to analyze the competition.

With this main keyword, I saw a forum thread, some low PA sites on 1st page, so I chose it.

What’s Your Content Strategy For The Site? Did you Write the Content Yourself or did you Outsource?

After 2 failed niche sites, I tried to outsource content on Upwork.

Fortunately, I found a new writer who always produced good quality content with a low price; but, we lost contact. She just didn’t reply to me anymore without any reasons.

>> Hire A Pro Content Writer | Affordable & Reliable! <<

Do You Use WordPress To Setup Your Website? If Yes, What hosting, theme and plugins did you use? How Did You Structure The Site?

I used WP to build my site. It was hosted by Bluehost with Genesis and eleven40 Pro child theme.

Here are my main installed plugins:

  • Contact Form 7: for contact page
  • TablePress: for table comparison chart.
  • Universal Star Rating: to show star rating on tables.
  • WordPress SEO by Yoast.
  • WP Smush.it: to reduce image size.
  • WP YouTube Lyte: to lazy load videos.
  • W3 Total Cache: to speed up my site.
  • Yet Another Related Posts Plugin

My niche site had the same structure as Tung’s dumbbell site and Spencer’s knife site: a static homepage of 3k words about buying guide, and top 5 product reviews. There are also some information and product review articles.

What’s Your Strategy To Drive Traffic To Your Website? What Link Building Tips Can You Offer?

My traffic is mainly organic from Google. I also followed Tung and Spencer advice:

  • Building base links using brand name, naked URLs, and generic keywords.
  • Boost the ranking with PBN posts and high PR links.

About one month later, when most the base links were indexed, I started link building phase 2.

I didn’t have enough money to build my own PBN, so I bought some PBN blog posts and high PR links.  Diversify backlink types, anchor texts and make use of PBN when it’s still effective.

How Well Does Your Website Convert? Did you do anything to increase the conversion rate?

It’s only about 2.3% in total, but much lower in the first six months. I only added some clear CTAs above the fold. So far, it helped increase the CR. I think there are many available spaces for CRO, but I did not implement anything before selling.

How did you sell your website for $17k? What was the process?

I sold my website on Empire Flippers, which was a great experience. I just had to submit my site, and prove my traffic/earnings, and then they did all the other things: finding buyer, payment protection, migration and hand-off.

How has the success from this website impacted your life?

I can prove to my family that I can make money online and live the way I choose. And with the $17k sale, I can build out more niche sites now.

Do you have any additional tips or advice for others that would like to replicate your success with their own websites?

Try to copy other people’s success first. Stop reading here and there to search for the secret sauce. Just go for it! You can find all you need on nichepursuits.com and cloudliving.com.

Be patient and never give up!

Do you have a blog or other place that people can following along with what you are doing?

No, I don’t have a blog yet.

23 comments

  1. Hi Ali,
    Great story. I must say I don’t understand half of what Hieu is talking about though. The abbreviations and names just fly over my head…

    1. It happens sometimes to get overwhelmed at the beginning ilya. Don’t worry when you read more lessons and finish WA training, everything becomes totally clear to you.

  2. It’s a nice and inspiring story..such kind of precise story is good and giving hope for everyone to get succeed.

  3. That’s nice…I am glad for them. But now I would like to get the link how to unsubscribe. I don’t want to spend any money, please.

  4. As others said, I agree this is a great story. It’s not over-the-top and unbelievable; rather, it is just someone like you and me putting in the right kind of work and reaping the reward.

    Great story.

  5. Hi Ali,

    I’m very much the same as you, I too Love a success story.

    This is a fantastic interview and I think it will open a lot of people’s eyes to exactly what is possible with affiliate marketing.

    I think it’s great that you’ve managed to dig deep with your questioning and Hieu’s answers provide a lot of insight.

    It shows that there was a fair amount of work involved, and this wasn’t just a fly-by-night, click-of-a-button, easy ride.

    This took planning, research, organization, and Hieu was sensible enough to outsource what he deemed were his weaknesses.

    I think there are many lessons for all of us to learn from this awesome interview.

    Great work again Ali.

    I Look forward to reading more of the great content you provide here.

    Partha

  6. Hi, this is a really cool story. It will certainly not be so easy to have such success in such a short time. Surely Hieu Nguyen will also have some secrets to achieve that result. We also create sites and nobody offers us anything. One day we also find our sites on “Empire Flippers” at a much better price. 😁
      This indifferent when we also reach its success, makes us understand that this is a job that gives many possibilities, very flexible in time and that in the end can be very profitable. It all depends on us, the harder we work and the greater our rewards will be. Ali, you’ve always been so good at providing us with valuable information and making us understand that even in the digital world we can find many profit opportunities and sometimes in times that in everyday life it is almost impossible to obtain. It is always a pleasure to read your post. I hope you are safe and see you soon.
    Georgi

    1. Thank you Georgi. I would be more than happy if my articles can help anyone to get success in creating an online business. Actually it’s my goal of creating digitalworldguru.com.

      Best,
      Ali

  7. Great success story. Thank you for sharing.

    It’s interesting to see people that work hard at affiliate marketing and succeed. There are so many of them! With so many success stories, it’s quite strange that affiliate marketing has still got a bad reputation around and that people class it within the same bracket as scam based MLM’s etc.

    You have actually shared Hieu’s story at a very relevant time, with Amazon recently reducing their affiliate commissions. It will be interesting to see if and how Hieu and other affiliate marketers change tact away from amazon based niche sites.

    Will be watching carefully!

    1. Hi Lawrence and thanks for your comment. I don’t think that affiliate marketers left or planning to leave Amazon or other affiliate programs because of recent changes. They just need to drive more traffic to their nice sites to cover reduced commission.

      Best,
      Ali

  8. Thanks Ali, for sharing this incredible success story. Well done, in the interview style. Very inspiring, thanks for the outsourcing links, great idea to outsource content writing.

  9. Wow, thanks for motivating me. I started my affiliate journey in January this year. I like the way my site looks and the progress so far. On the other side, i didn’t make any money so far. I know this is a process, and i need to give it more time and to be consistent.
    The internet is full of affiliate success stories. What I hate about those is, that the most of them are fake, and the guys who talk about their so call success are only looking to sell you something at the end.
    This article, furthermore, is about some random guy who didn’t become a millionaire in one year. the amount of money is real and possible to achieve. And that is why I love this post. I hope more people will be able to read this so I will gladly share it whit my friends.
    Thank you
    Srdjan

  10. Hi,

    I came across this article and thought it was good enough for a little comment! It’s a great article.

    It just shows you what is possible when you have your own site that can target the right keywords.

    I was thinking about a good table form for my own site, I will look at the TablePress plugin described too so very much of benefit to me too.

    Regards,

    Alan

  11. Wonderful post! Your title really caught my attention – and i’m glad it did! What an inspiring story! I can’t believe he sold that website for 17k! I didn’t think that was possible!

    I really enjoyed the Q & A with Hieu. You are led by who you follow – and after reading this. Hands down, I want to follow Hieu. Now that I know this is achievable, and that the success I am looking for is really out there – I have no time to waste.

    I am very excited to learn what Hieu has learned, and see where my journey will go. Thank you so much for introducing Hieu and his amazing success story! I hope you do this with more people who have had success. I will be sharing this post with my friends!

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